Alison Reads

An unlikely best-seller, this is an account of the Puritan settlers in New England in the 1630s — not the Mayflower crew, but the founders of Massachusetts and Rhode Island which included John Winthrop and Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Vowell has done an impressive amount of research and she tries to get inside 17th-century heads instead of projecting 21st-century values on them. Her youth is a little disconcerting for a fogey history major like me, though, when she talks about getting her history lessons from the Brady Bunch and the Simpsons and other TV sitcoms. All in all, a well-written and interesting account of about 10 years which very few people bother to learn about after grade school. Worth reading.